Opinion
Column

Given the scandals roiling in the country’s Senate, many Canadians have come to believe it would be the easy and expedient thing to do to simply abolish the place.

After all, they argue, it is nothing — and has always been nothing — but a institutional façade for partisan hacks, fundraisers, yes-men, yes-women and other party organizers, gone to their patronage-imbued reward. The current gang of 104 senators (one seat is vacant) has done little to change those perceptions — and a great deal to cement them.

Recent controversies concerning senatorial housing allowances, expense accounts and criminal charges against one senator have burnished the notion into Canadian consciousness, even more indelibly, that the red chamber is a place of needless extravagance, dubious ethics and meaningless political debate. That it is an anachronism best banished to the dust bin of Canadian history. That it symbolizes all that is wrong with the country’s politics and its parliamentary institutions.

The Senate is also one of the single-most tangible symbols of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s vacillations over the years.

The opposition-leader Harper of the early 2000s disdained the Senate as much as he disliked all forms of Liberal presumption of power. All that was a decade ago and is beginning to fade from popular memory, but Stephen Harper 2.0 used to rail against the lack of accountability among individual members and the country’s parliamentary institutions as a whole. He jabbed his forefinger toward the government benches from his place in opposition, condemning, in the strongest of parliamentary language, every absence of government transparency, every example of wasteful spending and every democratic inefficiency — including its outmoded institutions, such as the Senate.

Stephen Harper 3.0, however, has played the partisan game with zeal and vigour. He has so far appointed 58 senators — every one a Conservative — stuffing the upper chamber as one might a ballot box. And all this while asking the Supreme Court of Canada for an opinion about whether the government could legally reform the Senate.

In other words, Harper has played the game with gusto even as he’s planning something else — exactly what is not yet clear.

No wonder, then, that so many Canadians would prefer to wield the broom and be done with it.

Doing so, however, would be a mistake. What the country needs is not the abolition of the Senate, but a meticulous, serious-minded reform of it, attuned to the political sensibilities of 21st-century citizen stakeholders, rather than 19th-century colonists and ruling classes.

The notion of the Senate as a place of “sober second thought” (Sir John A. Macdonald’s words), where new legislation would get a thorough going-over before being sent down the street for royal assent, has abundant merit. Bicameralism is a principle that operates efficiently in many other democracies around the world. Nearly everywhere — the most notable current exception being the hyper-partisan dysfunction of the American Congress — it works well.

Ironically, it becomes even more important as a counterweight against the House of Commons when the latter is dominated by a prime minister who prefers to pack all manner of sundry measures into omnibus bills, maintain an exceedingly high level of control over his caucus and cabinet, and obliterate his political enemies, inside the House and outside it, rather than merely defeat them in parliamentary votes and at the ballot box.

The much-maligned Senate represents a call for a new type of Canadian project. It’s a summons to the national imagination as much as it is a call for procedural and structural reform.

Imagine an upper chamber populated by highly regarded political elders whose allegiance to an overarching set of Canadian values — justice, equality, diversity and the rule of law — trumps the more mundane and pragmatic allegiances to caucus or provincial and parochial interests.

Imagine a Senate where debate is robust and vibrant, carried forward by hard-working senators who view their appointment or election as a precious opportunity to offer a historically durable gift to a nation, rather than an installation into a chamber of perks, rewards and coddling.

Imagine a place where salaries, benefits, pensions and travel allowances are modest, even meagre, but where opportunities to make career-crowning contributions to a nation’s life and identity are the compelling reasons for public service.

Imagine a collection of the 100 wisest minds in the country, carrying an air of respect and authority that overshadows that of their political cousins in the Commons, whose game would also be forced to a higher level.

To abolish the Senate would be to abolish an historic opportunity — one to which the nation could rise, even amid the cacophony of the current circus.

The preceding 146 years need not be an excuse. They could, rather, be the prelude to getting it right.